New theory doesn’t limit consciousness to the brain By Laura Sanders
Enriched with information
As a scientist, Giulio Tononi’s goal is as lofty as it gets: He wants to understand how the brain generates consciousness. In his hunt, he and colleagues at
the University of Wisconsin–Madison
routinely use state-of-the-art brain
scanners to produce torrents of information that stream into sophisticated
computer programs describing various
aspects of brain function.

But Tononi’s most profound insight
didn’t spring from this huge cache of
scientific data. It came instead from a
moment of quiet reflection. When he
stepped away from his scanners and data
and the hustle of the lab and thought —
deeply — about what it was like to be conscious, he realized something: Each split
second of awareness is a unified, holistic
experience, completely different from
any experience before or after it.

From that observation alone, Tononi
intuited a powerful new theory of consciousness, a theory based on the flow
of information. He and others believe
that mathematics — in particular, a set
of equations describing how bits of data
move through the brain — is the key to
explaining how the mind knits together
an experience.

Because of its clarity, this informational intuition has resonated with